An Evening with Susan Breen in Conversation with Alexandra Hidalgo

Join us to hear from author Susan Breen about her cozy holiday romance, MERRY. She will be joined in conversation by Alexandra Hidalgo. After the talk, there will be time for Q&A and book signing. We hope to see you there!

Want to pre-order your copy of the book? Click here for hardcover, or here for paperback.

About the book:

Merry Bingham used to love Christmas—until she started worrying all the time about family, money, and death. The only thing that continues to bring her joy is reading from her heirloom edition of A Christmas Carol, autographed by Charles Dickens himself and passed down through five generations of her family. Now, as she waits for the results of the medical tests that will tell her whether this Christmas season will be her last, Merry prepares to give her book to the next generation. Except none of her three children wants it.Merry refuses to surrender Christmas or Dickens without a fight, so she sells the book and uses the money to take her family to London. She will fill them with Christmas joy even if she has to cram it down their throats.But the harder Merry pushes, the worse everything gets. Her children erupt into vicious arguments, her gentle husband stops talking to her, her deluxe rental apartment is not what was promised. Oh, and she keeps seeing the ghost of Charles Dickens around town—and he is not happy with her.

About the author:

Susan Breen is the award-winning author of The Fiction Class and the Maggie Dove mystery series. She teaches novel writing at Gotham Writers and has been on the faculty of conferences from Cape Cod to Dubai. She loves stories about families, London, ghosts, guilt, atonement, dogs, Charles Dickens, and Christmas. She likes the idea of collecting rare books, though so far, she’s only collected two, both of them being early editions of A Christmas Carol.

About the conversation partner:

Alexandra Hidalgo is a Venezuelan writer, filmmaker, theorist, memoirist, and editor whose documentaries have been official selections for film festivals in 15 countries and been screened at universities around the United States. She is the recipient of From the Heart Productions’ inaugural “Carole Joyce Award for Excellence in Documentary Storytelling.” Her videos and writing have been featured in The Hollywood Reporter, IndieWire, NPR, The Criterion Collection, and Women and Hollywood. She writes about relationships and the creative life in her Love in Many Genres Substack, and her All the Love! YouTube channel, which features “Stories About Family, Books, Movies, and TV” content, garners 25,000+ views a month. She has a PhD in English from Purdue University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University and is associate professor and Crow Chair of English at the University of Pittsburgh. Her video book Cámara Retórica: A Feminist Filmmaking Methodology for Rhetoric and Composition received the Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award. Her scholarship has been published in Kairos, Composition Studies, Enculturation, and Peitho, among others. Her video essay, “Motherhood on the Screen,” received the Kairos Best Webtext Award. She is co-founder and editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal constellations: a cultural rhetorics publishing space.

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